Andrew McMillan: Every Salt Advance
Red Squirrel Press, 2009 (ISBN: 978-1-906700-00-3) £4.00
In Andrew McMillan’s own words “poetry shouldn’t be about writing the extraordinary, it should be about taking the ordinary and showing it to be extraordinary.” and this is exactly what he does in his debut Every Salt Advance.
The pamphlet begins on ‘Thursday morning’, in the aftermath of a relationship split. We see the subject of the poem awake in the “yawning, temporary sun” in which he had “resigned himself to chess/and straining peas alone.” Here we are taken from the overtly poetic, to the poignantly comical which grounds the poem. Next, the narrator steps outside of the poem-world to comment on what might have happened next, one possibility is that “he wept until small creatures/came to wash their faces in his cheeks”, and now we are in the realms of the extraordinary, metaphor-wise of course, but the narration is so convincing I can perfectly see and believe this.
These are not the first tears, nor is this the only heartbreak in this collection. Many of the poems are about distances between people. Throughout ‘now you’ve left’, the narrator insists that the subject knows he’s ok, though “the country is set between us like a table…I am almost happy because…a moose passes me as though/he were a milkman/I’d known for half my life…” Again, this conflation of the ordinary and the extraordinary which is here, both disarming and reassuring.
Andrew McMillan has a knack for writing tenderness without sounding mawkish, and his poems dealing with paternity are witness to this: ‘dad’ was shortlisted for the Grist Poetry Prize. This poem, in three sections, talks of a warmth and tenderness in a father/son relationship “when, on catching me topless with/Thom Gunn and grinning,/you nodded as if to say that you/were proud and dad that’s why/I am too”, and then in the last section any inching towards sentimentality is cut short by the visceral “all I think/is that I want/the hand Thom grasped in his;/ I want to chop it/off and dad I want/to frame it by my bed/and dream of boys/who maim their fathers/for their hands.”
That McMillan writes in lower-case, enables him to develop an intimacy with the reader – capital letters would be somehow obtrusive – as you move in to listen. He is also a minimalist when it comes to punctuation, and prefers to let the white page add its own breaths of silence, choosing instead artful line breaks and stanza breaks.
A recent article in Poetry News praised the pamphlet form and talked about it as an excellent medium for those starting out. Andrew McMillan is only twenty-one years old, and after this impressive introduction, I will be extremely interested to see what he does next.
* We'll be publishing one of Andrew's poems later this week